As part of the I ain’t gonna paint no more! project, Grade 5/6 students used different mediums to change the way we viewed an ordinary self-portrait. Students experimented with going beyond the border of their face, cutting their portrait up to make it disjointed, using paper to add texture and pastels and textas to add colour. The results were unique and powerful!

To finish off the documentation of this wonderful project, here is a video of the Living Gallery. All students were invited to come to the netball court and be part of the Living Gallery, in which students from Prep – 4 could come and view them as living artworks. Well done Grade 5/6, you’re truly amazing!

Wow! What an amazing experience the face painting workshops were for every child involved!! Thank you to all who donated face paint, without your generosity this project would not have been a success.

We started the workshop off by showing the students the videos below and then asking them questions about how Humphries and Meade’s work relates to the I ain’t gonna paint no more! project we’ve been working on since the beginning of term.

Georgina Humphries

Alexa Meade

Students offered up insightful perspectives on illusions, using skin as a canvas and playing with ideas and concepts to change how we interpret artwork. Students demonstrated higher-order thinking skills when exploring and responding to the artworks, through means of class discussion and artistic expression during the second half of the workshop. Students were given 20 minutes to paint their partner’s face and then they swapped and had their face painted. Students that chose to opt-out painted a mask. It’s so great to see young primary school children participating in such great contemporary art projects!

Thank you to Paige and Max from Grade 3 for being our official photographers for the day! You did an amazing job capturing the creativity of the workshops!

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Andrew Williamson helped to run the workshops and took some of these amazing close-up portraits below, just stunning!

Following on from the photographic portraits, here are some collaborative portraits done over a 50 minute session. The idea behind this stage of the project was to spark a conversation around ownership of artwork, leading up to the face painting workshop. Each student was given a piece of paper and was told to only draw two things on the face, for example an eye and nose. The students then swapped their drawing with another person and drew two more facial features. There were 7 swaps in total. We had such a great reflective discussion regarding who owned the work and why. Some students were territorial over their first work, others weren’t fussed and believed everyone owned the work. Some students tried to tame works, others tried to make them more wild. Some students respected the style or aesthetic, others wanted to do their own thing. Overall, it was a great experience for students to work collaboratively and not get too attached to the artwork.

We’ve been getting a bit wild in the art room lately! The Grade 5/6s have been focusing on the book I ain’t gonna paint no more! By Karen Beaumont and illustrated by David Catrow, by using it as a springboard for rich discussions regarding contemporary art, abstract art and using the human body as a canvas. Over three weeks, students have experimented with a variety of different mediums and colour to abstract portraits from unknown artists. Here are few snaps of their developmental artworks from the past few weeks. Stay tuned for Part 2: abstracting their own photographic self-portraits.